Pope
Francis may be the most famous
pope both for what he says and does not say.
Speech or silence, both are an indictment against him — and well they
should be.
When he speaks, he sows confusion. When he keeps silent,
he sows confusion.
It may be the case that to speak clearly, unambiguously,
and to the point, eludes Francis altogether. But it certainly is the
case that to do so is not useful to him.
As we had stated in another essay,1
the value of nuance lies in its ability to provide one with a claim
to “plausible deniability,” which is to say that it enables one to state
something in such a way that the statement can be as easily retracted
as it had been stated — while requiring neither commitment nor responsibility
from the one employing it. No indisputable commitment is made and no
real or unequivocal responsibility is taken or assumed. It is speech
(or text) as duplicity, as eager to run into the arms of an adoring
public as it is to flee an angry mob.
One can state something in the public square and allow
it to gain traction in public consciousness — but not so unambiguously
as to deny having said it ... at least as it had been construed or understood.
It is a potent poison, equally effective by the hand or on the tongue.
And it is used as such. We see this routinely in courts of law. The
prosecutor will state something that he well knows he is not to permitted
to say or suggest, and allow himself to be censured by the judge — but
only after the horse has left the barn. He has tainted the jury. He
has brought to their awareness what they should not have heard … but
more importantly, should not have and would not have considered as pertinent
to the trial — but once heard, as the prosecutor knew in advance — the
jury now cannot “unhear.” However much the judge may admonish the jury
“to disregard” what the prosecutor had said — well, you know the rest.
Unfortunately, there is no one to admonish Catholics (and
the world at large) “to disregard” what Francis said. Do you really
believe that he does not understand this? This is his way of furtively
communicating to the world what is not aligned with genuine Catholic
teaching. It is, in a word, nuanced — just enough to communicate the
clear intent, but not sufficient to convict him of “formal” heresy.
No Stepping Back
What
is more, Francis goes one step further: he does not bother to retract
what he had said — however scandalous and malignant to the faithful
— or even to clarify it; he deliberately leaves it in the “fog of (mis)understanding,”
allowing it to be favorably interpreted by those to whom it was “really”
addressed, and to whom it is a wink from the pope that the sin most
pleasing to them is okay with him — “he’s on their side.” While Francis's
PR team at the Vatican is ever ready to “explain” what Francis really
meant, Francis himself, we must point out, never steps back from the
scandal he provokes. He very well understood what he said ... and
so do we.
Could such a public figure be this brazenly disingenuous?
This patently dishonest? Especially a pope, a figure that, at least
in the in the historic imagination (and often in fact) has been associated
with what is holy, good, and true? He is, after all, supposed to be
as Catholic and holy “as the pope” … because he is the pope.
How have things come to this? How has the papacy itself
become so corrupt, so duplicitous, so mendacious, so … venal?
Is it a recent and sudden affliction? Or was it long in
coming? Is it from a burst abscess that first spilled out its purulence
on the Church 10 years ago with the brazenly open machinations by the
collusion of prelates in the self-acclaimed “Sankt Gallen Mafia” to
bring Jorge Bergoglio to the papacy? We still have not come to the responsible
realization after so many, many, years of being told that the Church,
following Vatican II, was healthier and holier than it had ever been
— when our own perception was quite different. We told ourselves that
it was only us, isolated individuals, who had witnessed the abuses,
the sacrilege, and the growing secularization of the Church — surely,
we were told in one way or another, the problem was personal,
with us, and not our perceptions.
A Painful Realization
It
is a deeply painful realization that we had been deceived, routinely
lied to by the reigning Church hierarchy for 70 years: all the popes,
cardinals, bishops, priests and Religious, beginning with Angelo Roncalli
(John XXIII) and every pope following him — we were told with ever greater
emphasis that “all is well” with the Church (apart from certain malcontents
among whom we were numbered). We simply had not accepted, or refused
to accept, “the winds of inevitable change that the Holy Spirit was
breathing in the Church.” We were inflexible, unable to accommodate
ourselves to the clear “sign of the times”; we were stubborn, “rigid”,
as Bergoglio is fond of calling us, and we were resisting the Holy Spirit
Who was sending us a “New Advent” and Who, we were scolded, was crying
out in so many charismatic “Tongues” that we were out of step and out
of line.
Francis, Bergoglio, Jorge, whatever you choose to call
him, is simply the apex liar in a line of those who lied to us stretching
back 70 years, telling all who are not promoting his heretical “ecumenical”
agenda and his unique path of “Accompaniment” in sin, that they
are the problem, not him. How could he be? He is Francis the
“proudly humble” — until you cross his path or call out his radical
agenda for what it is: an ecumenism that has manifested itself as nothing
less than polytheism. All “gods” are the true god. Christ is an embarrassment;
a stumbling block to ecumenism — and an impediment to pansexual freedom.
A Premature Burial. How it came to this
It really had come to this some 70 years ago when ambitious churchmen
and theologians of the Nouvelle Theologie, together with disaffected
bishops — (the undeniably Modernist and “progressivist” elements in
the Church, then and now) — told itself in the conceit of its imagination
that the Catholic Church needed a Council to engage a world that
was somehow and suddenly more modern that all the “modern” worlds that
preceded and accompanied the Church for millennia — and in times no
less straitening. The Church, the Body of Christ, however, was
not on the Modernist trajectory they had set for themselves, but clung,
rather, to antiquated notions of holiness and the equally outdated
commission for the salvation of souls as her preeminent responsibility
— entrusted to her by no one less than God Himself. But
their ambitious plans and God's plans did not coincide: there was no
room for social activism, a neo-sexualized society, inclusionism, the
environment, and political intrigue; in a word modernity (as
understood, of course, by Modernists) which had become synonymous with
goodness itself. So they set about planning a premature burial for a
Church still very much alive and well. Interment of the Body had been
planned for 1965.
Of course, as we have painfully learned, the “progressives”
had diagnosed an illness that did not exist, and because they subsequently
found that it did not exist — and that they themselves were identified
as the pathogens infecting the sound and healthy Body — in a bid to
rehabilitate their now compromised integrity, they did what they were
by now adept at doing: they lied again. Desperate to justify their
catastrophic misdiagnosis, they declared the Church dead, and then performed
a needless autopsy — on a Body that never died — in order to dissect
it, and having planned beforehand to identify it as sick, declared in
1965 that it had long been in need of “doctors” and medicine which only
they could have applied — with no less ghastly a result as any
vivisection.
The good news is that, despite their best efforts, the
patient lived — and is still in recovery, and although the infection
is severe, a full recovery is expected. The bad news is that the same
doctors are still in charge. And among them is the Chief Resident.
Geoffrey K. Mondello
Editor
Boston Catholic Journal
March 31, 2023
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